Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The
wildlife-rich Falkland
Islands get extensive coverage in my new third edition of Moon
Handbooks Patagonia, which has recently appeared on the shelves. To
get a further update for upcoming season, I conducted an email interview with
Paul Trowell, the Falkland Islands Tourist
Board’s general manager. I was particularly interested in developments for
independent travelers, rather than the cruise ship passengers who constitute
the bulk of the Islands’ visitors. The interview has been condensed and edited
for continuity.

WBB: What is
new for the Falklands this season?

PT: The
Falkland Islands are going through a strong period of growth in 2010/2011, in
fact forecasting a 16 percent increase in numbers. This has resulted in the
creation of a new National Tourism Strategy that caters for increased
infrastructure and marketing initiatives to cope with the growing demand. Unfortunately,
due to confidentiality, I cannot disclose the initiatives in the plan but as
soon as I can I will update you.

WBB: Are
there any new accommodations this year? What does demand look like for this
season? Is the oil boom affecting the availability of accommodations and other
services for tourists, in Stanley
and in Camp (as the countryside is known here)?

PT: There has always been a shortage in peak time, November to February. We
encourage travellers if they are coming in this time to book in advance. There
is an additional cottage on Bleaker
Island.

Oil exploration is affecting the availability of accommodations in Stanley (pictured above),
where there is a total of about 220 beds, but not in Camp, though we’re
conducting some research now.

WBB: Of all visitors to the Falklands, what is the
percentage of or approximate numbers of independent travelers (as opposed to
cruise ship passengers, pictured below on Stanley's tourist jetty)? What sort of contribution do they make to the local
economy?

PT: The 2010/11 cruise season closed with a total of 42,000 passenger
arrivals. Compared to the 2009/10, the number of cancellations has been few
(only four vessels with a total of 2,659 passengers), however, the numbers are
still down compared to 2009/10 when 48,359 cruise ship passengers arrived in
the Falklands.

Average spend per passenger is up however, to £34.50 from £32.82 last
season. This means that almost £1.4 million was spent on the Islands by cruise
passengers, with 43 percent of this being spent on tours, 38 percent on
shopping, and 16 percent on food and drink.

The FITB Cruise Passenger Survey showed that 50% of visitors had visited
the islands before, and almost one quarter (24 percent) stated that the Falkland
Islands were “essential” or “very essential” factor in their cruise itinerary
decision. Over one quarter (27 percent) said that they would like to return to the
islands on a land-based tour.

Land-based arrivals grew 14.8 percent, totaling 6,739, and the average
spending per head increased by 20 percent (or £100) to £595 in 2010. In total
for 2010/11 overall, visitor arrivals by inbound overnight tourists, cruise
passengers and domestic tourists resulted in 61,563 tourists, spending £5.41
million, an 8.4 percent increase over 2009/10.

WBB: What
percentage of independent travelers come from the United States?

PT: Thirteen
percent from the USA.

WBB: Of all
independent travelers, what percentage of them return to the Islands? Do you
have any idea whether many cruise ship passengers return independently?

PT: Our stats from January 1, 2000, to date suggest that 13 percent of
travellers are on a second visit, 2.1 percent are on a third visit, 4.1 percent
are on a fourth visit and 15.1 percent have been more than four times. [On the
latter stats,] you may have to contact the local shipping companies who deal
direct with the cruise lines.

Well, just down the road, really. Earlier this month, an
attack of bronchitis caused me to postpone an appearance at REI Fremont, 43962 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538, tel. 510/651-0305. We
have rescheduled the event for tonight, November 29, at 7 p.m. It’s free of
charge, but this is a small venue, so attendees should make reservations online
or by telephone with REI.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I won’t return to
South America until late January or early February, but that doesn’t mean a
lack about Argentina,
Chile,
and the rest of the Southern Cone. Álvaro Jaramillo, whose birding
guide to Chile I recently reviewed, has passed on some very useful
information from his recent trip there.

The Road to Lauca

Most of Álvaro's updated information comes from Parque
Nacional Lauca (pictured above) and vicinity, where I spent most of a year doing my M.A.
fieldwork in the 1980s. This is an area where, unfortunately, the mining
industry also has a major presence; in gateway village of Putre (pictured below), the Hotel
Las Vicuñas is now open only to mining personnel. That said, Álvaro
reports, “[T]here are two new hotels in town: Hotel Q'antati (which I
stayed in), great rooms, heating, breakfast but no lunch/dinner. The Chakana Mountain Lodge I
saw from a distance and it looked nice, but I did not see it up close. “

The route up to Lauca,
though, “is a mess. There is road construction going on from the army base
[near Putre] to Chucuyo,
with many delays, dust, trucks. The experience there was a nightmare this year.
The company that is doing it (Kodama) is clueless
unfortunately, and they are being critiqued from all sides on their work. While
we were there, a head-on collision occurred on a one-lane stretch they were
working on; one man died. Much of this road construction is to get it up to the
level that it can take heavy truck traffic, which is expected to increase
greatly from mining operations in the area.” Barbara Knapton of Alto Andino Nature Tours,
who lives in Putre, says the delays have made it difficult to reach and return
from the park; I will have more on the topic in the near future.

The Kings of Tierra del Fuego

For birders, the big
news comes from Tierra
del Fuego (on the right half of the NASA image above). On the Chilean side of the island, just across the Strait of
Magellan from the city of Punta
Arenas, “[T]here is now an area on Bahía Inútil [“Useless
Bay,” in English], where it is possible to see a flock of loafing king penguins.
I have not been there yet, but am excited at the possibility to see this superb
creature at such an accessible location.” While this would still mean a
full-day excursion from Punta Arenas, kings rarely appear so close to significant
population centers – I myself have seen many on the Falkland
Islands (the one below occupies part of a mixed colony with gentoos), but never on the South American continent or Tierra del Fuego.

Flying the Ashy Skies

Finally, Álvaro adds a word for those flying south from
Santiago or Buenos Aires. His flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas “had to skip the traditional stop over at Puerto
Montt because of the smoking Puyehue
(Caulle) Volcano, and then farther south on the flight we could see smoking
Hudson
doing its thing! Two smoking volcanoes on one flight was a first for me; on
that day (early November) Puyehue was definitely more active than Hudson. I
would advise tourists to think about backup plans if they are planning on
flying to Puerto
Montt during this season if Puyehue increases activity once again. I heard
of flight cancellations to Temuco in
late October as well. The wind direction is prevailing from the West, creating
a greater problem in Argentina, but there are enough local wind shifts that one
is not always in the safe zone in Chile.” The NASA satellite image above, taken in July, indicates the pattern of ash distribution.

Moon Patagonia – On the Road Again!

Well, just down the road, really. Earlier this month, an
attack of bronchitis caused me to postpone a promotional digital slide presentation at REI Fremont, 43962 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 94538, tel.
510/651-0305. We have rescheduled the event, for this coming Tuesday, November
29, at 7 p.m. According to my doctor, I am longer contagious.

WBB: I don’t know
much about Corcovado (pictured above). Are there any facilities open to the public?

KMT: Corcovado is
not inaccessible, but it’s accessible by sea. You can see it from the highway,
but you can’t get in from there. I mean, I guess you can if you’re Robert Scott…

WBB: With regard
to [Estancia Valle Chacabuco, pictured above], I’ve been looking at the style – it’s very
different from the traditional sheep estancia.

KMT: It comes
more from the Argentine Patagonian style, from the English…

WBB: Well, you see similar details at the big house at Monte
León (pictured above, now a guest house). Some of those resemble the little details here, though the cladding
is very different…

KMT: This came about, we have a series of photographs we’ve
been taking for years of classic and beautiful houses we found in Argentine
Patagonia, and when we started here because we have all this rock, which comes
out of the valley, this is what we decided to use here. It’s emblematic of the
Patagonian, not the Chilean necessarily, because the English weren’t here.

WBB: Actually, the English were a little farther north. Lucas Bridges was here.

KMT: Yes, he was here, his house is up on the border.

WBB: Are you going to preserve any of the existing
buildings?

KMT: Well, his house is preserved as an historical monument.
It’s on the Entrada Baker, as you go across Paso
Roballos [toward Argentina] up there.

WBB: I did not know that. Is it visible?

KMT: Yes, you can drive in there. We’re going to fix it up
and there’ll be a sign that says “homesite of Lucas Bridges.”

WBB: What about any of the existing buildings here?

KMT: No. These were not really classic estancia buildings. I
mean, we’ve painted them, we’ve fixed them up. It was an army barracks here.

WBB: I look at things like, say, the wool shed, which is
something that is sort of typical in both Argentina and Chile.

KMT: No, people will see that up on the border, where we
have an historical site, but not down here.

WBB: But you will have something about its legacy as a sheep
farm?

KMT: There will be an information center here.

WBB: Who were the original owners of this property?

KMT: It was leased to some people, but there was no kind of
title on the land until…I think the De Smets were granted the first actual
titles, not to the current outline. The reason that Reserva
Nacional Tamango exists is that the De Smets family had to cede that out of
the ranch to get titles. I don’t pretend to be the storyteller on this one, but
it was very complex getting the titles to this property for that family.

WBB: How long were the De Smets here, do you know?

KMT: Well, they came down from Chile
Chico, that’s where all the Belgians landed. His father, I’m going to say
45 or 50 years ago, but that was not the whole ranch, that was their presence
here.

WBB: So not that long ago?

KMT: Well, for one family, down here, pretty far from
everything, that’s quite a bit actually. Lucas Bridges was here long before the
De Smets, there were people ranching here before the De Smets came. Anywhere
there was grass, people were ranching. There weren’t many fences in those days.
There were shepherds and sheep all over the place, that’s why the place is so
beat up.

WBB: Have all the fences been removed now? Is work still proceeding?

KMT: No, that’s going to be a long job. We’ve gotten most of
the easy ones. We probably 200 miles left to go, probably more, maybe 250.

WBB: That’s one of the big volunteer jobs? How many
volunteers do you have coming down here?

KMT: Well, this year we cut it back. We have about a
hundred. We had over 500 people.

WBB: What are the terms that they come on?

KMT: You have to stay a minimum of three weeks, pay US$15
per day for food, you have to get yourself to the crossroads down below [on the
Carretera
Austral], and then we pick you up and drop you off. Some people stay three
weeks, some people stay two months, some people stay six months. It depends on
what their personal plans are.

WBB: So it sounds, given all the land you have, that it’s a
selective process?

KMT: We’re running two different sorts of programs. There’s
sort of an internship where you are actually coming here for a specific job.
Like the guys here in the lodge, they came to work in the lodge, so you’re more
selective with them because you’re looking for certain types of experience and
skills. But the bulk of the volunteers is more physical labor; we have a pretty
extensive volunteer site on our website and people go in there.

WBB: How many people are here at any given time, then?

KMT: About a hundred. It depends how many construction guys
are here. Right now we’re starting the new information center and museum and
so, once they get that cracked open the number will go up significantly.

WBB: One of the new buildings I saw going up across the
creek here, what’s that?

KMT: That’s all housing for employees, they’re apartments.

WBB: That would be permanent full-time staff? Presumably
there would also be seasonal employees? Are those mostly foreigners?

KMT: Yes, for people who will be here after it’s a national
park. Everybody is Chilean. Everybody. The only foreigners are Doug, myself,
Nadine [Lehner, Conservación
Patagónica’s publicist], the guys in San Francisco [CP’s US office], that’s
it. Obviously there are foreign volunteers, but in terms of employees our
policy is everybody is Chilean or everybody is Argentine. We have one exception
in Argentina, at Iberá, Ignacio Jiménez is a Spaniard and he’s one of the top
wildlife guys around.

WBB: For what it’s worth, this is an opinion of my own, but
I’ve been to Iberá at least half a dozen times and it always astonishes me. It’s
such an extraordinary place and I’m always telling people that if you really
want to see something interesting in that part of the country, skip Iguazú
and go to Iberá. I think it’s so much more interesting.

KMT: I don’t know, I’m pretty addicted to those falls but I
agree, you see the falls and then you go to Iberá immediately.

WBB: Iguazú is an impressive sight, but I don’t like what
they’ve done with it, it’s become Disneyfied and just overrun with people.
Iberá gets not even one percent of the visits that Iguazú gets. It’s become a
mass experience, Iberá is so much more intimate.

WBB: Yes, I have, it almost sounds like stalking, but I was
there last year about the time your plane landed, just shortly after. I coincidentally
happened to be coming through and spoke with Leslie Cook, whom I’ve known for
quite a few years. I’ve visited the place before, though I’ve never stayed
there. I had come from Iguazú, just when it started raining and the road turned
to crap.

KMT: Yes, it’s quite bad, sounds familiar.

WBB: Do you have anything else you want to tell me?

KMT: I think it’s important that people know that one of the
reasons we’re here is we have between Tamango and this property a little over
or under 10 percent of the remaining huemul [Andean deer, pictured below] population. We’re
working very hard, along with Conaf,
to try to see these numbers go up. We’re doing a lot of support of studies that
are going on here, to find out what the threats are. This area has all its species
intact, another reason that it’s a real conservation priority, and also it has
every kind of ecosystem found in the Patagonian Southern Cone in one place.

WBB: What are the threats to the huemul in this area?

KMT: Primarily, livestock everywhere, loss of habitat. Hunting
and poaching, dogs coming up from Cochrane that are feral and don’t get fed down
there, so they’re hunting. That’s a big problem here in this population,
probably the most critical. So it’s the same thing everywhere, and the thing is
there are only an estimated 1,500 of them left.

WBB: In the country? In this area?

KMT: No, everywhere. That’s the world population, both the
Argentine and Chilean sides. This is one of the largest grassland restoration
projects in the world today.

WBB: We’re right on the edge between the forest and the
steppe.

KMT: That’s what I mean when I say all the Patagonian
ecotones that exist from rock and ice down to arid, though this is mostly semi-arid.
You don’t see the kind of landscape that you see out on the coast, you don’t
see those severe arid areas like you find around Monte León, but everything
else is here. The water systems here are pure, there are no trout in this lake
system and river system other than the Chacabuco, and the upper lakes have not
been stocked with trout. So you have a pure water system, and it’s a
significant system, especially considering the Patagonian region, there are
lakes, streams, lagoons, and wetlands, it’s very unusual. That’s why Conaf and Conama have wanted to put
this into conservation for decades, but they never could. So there are a lot of
reasons why we’re here.

WBB: So the huemul is the signature species for this area,
but are there any others?

KMT: Well, guanacos of course, but they’re abundant. The
mountain vizcacha is also red-listed, and we have populations of them all
around here.

WBB: I haven’t seen vizcachas here, are these the
same as in the Norte Grande
or are they a different subspecies?

KMT: I can’t answer that. But they’re not the same as the
ones in Iberá.

Author’s note: Related
to the chinchilla, the mountain vizcacha
to which Kris refers is the same species as occurs farther north, in Bolivia
and Peru as well as Argentina, but it is not on the IUCN Red List of
threatened species. In Argentina, there are two endangered species of vizcacha
rats, a totally different rodent, with very limited ranges.

Friday, November 18, 2011

In December of 2004, returning from my only visit to
Antarctica, I was about to fly from the Patagonian city of Río
Gallegos to Buenos
Aires, three hours to the north. Boarding
pass in hand, I headed to security at this relatively small airport only to
find nobody to check my documents and nobody manning the X-ray machine. At the
gate, there was nobody to collect my pass and, until I climbed aboard the Aerolíneas Argentinas jet,
nobody even to ask. Fortunately, the flight went on with no further glitches –
perhaps a nostalgic reminder of commercial aviation’s gentility in the days
before the Miami-Havana hijackings of the 1960s.

In reality, the Southern Cone countries manage to have
effective airport security without indulging in the TSA’s heavy-handed
ineptitude. Once, as I boarded a flight at Puerto
Montt's Aeropuerto El Tepual (pictured above), Chilean security detected a Swiss Army knife in my carry-on and,
instead of confiscation and a stern lecture, LanChile simply
told me I could recover the item in question at their baggage counter at my
destination of Coyhaique.
Did I mention that this was in pre-9/11 days? Even then, Chilean oversight was
better, but more reasonably administered.

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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

When I visited and lived in Buenos
Aires in the early to mid-1980s, changing money was a nightmare, as
out-of-control inflation – sometimes exceeding 50 percent per month - undercut
the peso ley and
its successors, the peso argentino (pictured above) and the austral (pictured below).
With their currency depreciating rapidly, Argentines fueled the fire by spending
their paychecks immediately on durable goods like automobiles that held their
value, and by purchasing dollars.

That lasted until President Carlos Menem’s “convertibility”
policy, implemented by Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, fixed the new peso at
par with the dollar in 1991. In the interim, it was a “Wild West” for currency
traders who respected official exchange rates in public but made their profits
in a behind-the-scenes mercado paralelo,
the most common euphemism for the black market.

For Argentines and foreigners, purchasing or selling dollars
at the official rate would have been economic suicide, but changing on the
black market had its own risks. In the days before ATMs, I carried a relatively
small amount of US cash and a larger amount of travelers’ checks (which were a
bureaucratic nightmare to cash even at official rates) for safety.

Just about everybody in Buenos Aires knew somebody who knew
somebody who had a connection to a backroom moneychanger, but it was hard for
foreigners who had few or no Argentine friends. The way it worked, that person
gave you a phone number and, when you called, an anonymous voice would ask how
much you wanted to change. That person would then give you an address and a
time to meet.

At that address, at the time indicated, you would ring the
bell and enter an office furnished with nothing more than a table and chair. The
meeting was perfunctory – hand over the dollars, sign the travelers’ checks,
and take your australes. Obviously, such a situation could have been a setup,
and we never felt totally comfortable. In our case at least, we were never even
cheated (though they paid less for travelers’ checks than for cash dollars).

The mercado paralelo reappeared after the economic meltdown
of 2001, when arbolitos (street changers, so called because they were planted
in one spot like a street tree) made their appearance in La City, as the Buenos
Aires financial district is known. Despite a massive devaluation, that peso has
survived, but the mercado paralelo has once again reappeared, fueled by the exchange
controls imposed by the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

I probably won’t be back in Buenos Aires until early next year, but
my friend Nicolás Kugler has provided an on-the-ground update: “Apparently arbolitos vanished once the government
set more strict controls, and a sort of tax police started to wander around the
banking district. I guess the mercado paralelo now is physically less obvious
than the 80s one, but their rates are shown by some newspapers (not the pro-Kirchner
ones) occasionally. I can imagine in the near future a government ban on reporting
exchange rates, as they did with inflation.”

“Anyway,” he adds, “this
city was built on contraband, so happily the people's will will prevail. As I
understand it, for the ordinary citizen (including tourists) there is no other
way to exchange dollars other than the official market with all its
regulations, unless one knows someone who does that in a cueva (not necessarily
a dark room, it could also be a travel agency).”

I had never heard the
term cueva (cave) used to describe a place where clandestine exchanges take
place, but I find it very evocative. It is not, he says, a traditional lunfardo (local slang) term, but it "has traditionally been referred to as any place for hiding, and with such meaning it adapted very well to the local financial world."

For what it's worth, the official rate stands at 4.29 pesos to the dollar, while the parallel rate recently dropped from five-pesos-plus to 4.75, pleasing the government in its "day to day fight against their axis of evil."

Paine in Winter

I have never visited Torres
del Paine in winter – though I once experienced a whiteout snowstorm in
mid-summer. Recently, though, I received a message from reader Steve Behaegel,
of Merelbeke, Belgium, with a link to his blog
detailing his own winter hiking trip on the “W” route. The photographs
accompanying the entry are stunning, and his advice to winter hikers is well
worth reading.

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Saturday, November 12, 2011

Earlier this year, I stayed at the new lodge at Valle
Chacabuco, the ambitious Chilean conservation project of environmental
philanthropists Doug
Tompkins and Kristine
McDivitt Tompkins. In the course of my brief stay, I had the opportunity
for an extended conversation with Kris (pictured above, center, at the lodge) over the proposed Parque
Nacional Patagonia, including several topics related to the park and
their other projects.

Because the conversation was so lengthy, I’m breaking it up
into two parts; part two will appear in the near future. It covers their
projects in both Chile
and Argentina,
under the auspices of the non-profit NGO Conservación Patagónica
(CP).

WBB: I’ve met Doug before, and I’ve met you extremely briefly.
Doug is in the press a lot more than you are.

KMT: A lot more.

WBB: I don’t know much about you personally – can you give me
a nutshell biography?

KMT: I was born in California…fourth generation ranching
family. I went to college, graduated and started working with Yvon Chouinard, who had
climbing equipment for a couple years and then in 1973 we started Patagonia company.
I started running that business a couple years later and retired in 1993 to
move to southern Chile with Doug to start working in conservation.

WBB: Do you spend all your time here in South America? I
understand you spend the summer in Pumalín
and the winter in Iberá
(Argentina).

KMT: Yes. I mean, we’re residents of the United States, we
go between Chile, the United States and Argentina, but the great majority of
our time is here. Our time is spent six months in Chile and six months in
Argentina, being based out of those two places – we move around a lot.

WBB: With regard to Valle Chacabuco (pictured above), when did you acquire the
place? Did you do so with the idea of creating a park?

KMT: In 2004. When we started coming through here in 1993,
we looked at it as the kind of place you would like to turn into a park. We
talked to the owner about it and he wasn’t necessarily interested, so we just
went on and did our things and then, several years later, we heard that it
might be up for sale, and that’s how it got started.

WBB: These were the Belgians? How long did it take to arrange
the purchase? Were there any other bidders?

KMT: Yes, it was Francisco De Smets. To answer the first
part of your question, it took about a year and four months from the time he
said he was considering selling to the time that we actually took over. A lot
of that was spent negotiating the price that we were prepared to pay versus
what he felt was acceptable. Once a deal was struck, it got out into the press
that and there was a group, non-government related, that was opposed to the
deal. They put up a competing bid and that took about four months of very
public back-and-forth about who would end up with Valle Chacabuco. Finally, at
the very last hour, we were able to make a bid and close in a way that the
owner thought was appropriate. It was brutal.

WBB: Who was the competitor? Was he planning to continue it
as a wool estancia?

KMT: Ricardo Ariztía.
Mr Chicken, though he has many other holdings besides chickens. He and about
five other guys, for anything but conservation.

WBB: What’s the area of the estancia?

KMT: We originally bought about 173,000 acres. Since then,
we’ve added three of four nearby inholdings to the park. We have one neighbor
who’s not interested in selling. He’s surrounded by us and a touch of Reserva
Nacional Jeinimeni. He has sheep and cattle.

WBB: How does this differ from Pumalín in setting it up, since
this is not going to be a private nature reserve? What's the difference between
the two projects? Will Conaf take over?

KMT: Well, of course, the landscape is different. We hope Pumalín
will become a national park too. Both will fall under the new Ministry of the
Environment, and will be going to whatever new national park system that they
are going to create.

WBB: Is there a timeline?

KMT: The timeline was to have Valle Chacabuco donated by
2017. That was always the timeline, but these things are very opportunistic, often
politically driven, so it could be sooner. It just depends on who the president
is and all the infrastructure is set, and we feel the park is ready to go
toward a donation. Then you have to see what the timing is. Our idea is not to
hold onto it, but to make it into a national park.

WBB: By the infrastructure, you mean finishing the
buildings, campgrounds…?

KMT: The principal ones, certainly, the biggest of them all
will be at the foot of this valley, and another at Casa Piedra as you go up
toward the [Argentine] border. We will have a few campsites up in Lago Chico
and other places, such as Lago
Cochrane. They won’t be big fancy campgrounds, but there’ll be designated
places where people can camp.

WBB: Does this property extend south to Lago Cochrane?

KMT: We go all the way to the lake, and then all the way to
the border along the lake. The national reserve is contiguous.

WBB: How open to visitors is the park at the moment? Are
there enough campgrounds functioning at the moment?

KMT: That’s the thing, that’s why we need to get two
campgrounds going immediately because we’ve got visitors and, other than the
lodge (pictured above), we have a little campground back here where stragglers and volunteers
camp out, but that’s not a public campground per se. People can use it, but
it’s not what you want visitors to be using. So people are welcome, but usually
for the day, or they’re stuck in the working campground.

WBB: Will the facilities resemble those at Pumalín, in terms
of what they offer in the campgrounds and such?

KMT: Yes, you know, a group area for cooking, some
individual campsites, with little quinchos, and then a lot of places where
people put up their tents and use the public bathrooms and showers.

WBB: Cold showers?

KMT: Yes.

WBB: Before we get onto that, I want to bring up the issue
you mentioned of presidential power, whoever happens to be in power at the
time. How has the current president responded to initiatives like this?

KMT: As Chilean presidents go, I think Sebastián
[Piñera] has got a real chance to be remembered as a president who is very
concerned about conservation. He has his own conservation project.

KMT: He’s also declared some areas as new protected areas.
Is it a lot, well, he’s only been in office a year, but he certainly understands
the necessity to have active protected areas, and that’s pretty rare.

WBB: Can he bring along the rest of his constituents, or his
party, on the issue? If not, can he bring along enough of them?

KMT: I have no idea, but I doubt it. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t
either. Chile has changed a lot since we started 20 years ago. We had a guest
here the other night, a friend of ours, from the business community of Chile,
and he has a significant place here on the other side of Lago Cochrane, and he
really sees that as a private conservation initiative. Andrónico Luksic
has a place down in Villa
O’Higgins that they consider to be a conservation project. Little by
little, things shift, just as they did in the United States.

WBB: Even now there remains a lot of opposition to expanding
protection of public lands in the United States. Just in terms of
infrastructure, I was surprised when I got in here yesterday to see the size of
the restaurant. Are you anticipating tour buses coming through?

KMT: Yes. In another 25 years, you have to imagine
Yellowstone when it was first designated a protected area, not a national park
yet, there was almost no way to get up there until they put the train in. You
have to imagine this park and other parks like it 25 or 50 years from now when
there will be a lot of people coming, up from El
Calafate and over, when Ruta
40 is paved.

KMT: That’s not in the master plan, I can tell you that for
sure. But after a certain point, we won’t be the ones to decide that.

WBB: You are encouraging people who have an interest in
conservation, who have the means, to become donors.

KMT: We have an active fund-raising program for this
project. Little Conservación Patagonia cannot possibly create this 650,000-acre
park without partners. Impossible. It’s too big. CP started in the year 2000,
the first project we did was the Monte
León National Park. Have you been there?

WBB: I have been to Monte León (pictured above) several times. Looking at it
from a distance, it seems it was simpler to accomplish that project on the
Argentine side, or at least quicker, than it was to do this in Chile, at
Pumalín. Would that fair to say?

KMT: They’re so different. Pumalín (pictured above) is almost 800,000 acres,
and Monte León was a one-purchase, 155,000-acre sheep estancia that was going
broke. It’s so difficult to compare the two. Monte León was fast because right
after we made the donation, [the late former Argentine president] Néstor Kirchner
came into power and he’s from Río
Gallegos, and in order to make it a real national park you have to cede
jurisdiction from [Santa Cruz] province to the federal government, and the
provinces hate the federal government. But Kirchner came into power just months
before the Río Gallegos legislature had to vote on that and he called up and
effectively said, “I don’t want to look like a schmoe, everybody get in line
and vote for this thing.”

WBB: So it was good timing.

KMT: So much in life is good timing. Monte León would have
languished as a national park, but without real jurisdiction if Kirchner hadn’t
happened to come into power then. He’d been governor forever of Santa Cruz and
was able to strong-arm them – ceding jurisdiction requires a 100 percent
legislative vote. Imagine trying to get that – that’s why it was so fast. We
did it in 18 months. Little CP can manage that kind of project, which we did
and we did it fast, but the scale and complexity of this project is different,
and so this is the only project we have where we have partners and we
absolutely couldn’t do it without them.

WBB: This is the first one where you’re using partners? How
many partners are there? All foreign partners, or Chilean partners as well?

KMT: It’s the only one. There are many partners. Ever since
we brought the property, I couldn’t have waltzed in here and spent enough money
to have bought the initial property, US$10 million. We could do a lot of that,
but we couldn’t do all of it.

The partners are mostly foreign, some European, one Chinese
man who’s a business partner and the rest from the States.

WBB: Do you still run into objections because the
participation is so overwhelmingly foreign?

KMT: We don’t get any objections to it, because this project
is 100 percent run by Chileans. This project pays Chilean taxes, people have
never cared nor would they analyze where all the funding has come from, they
know that CP is a US-based public charity. Where the funding comes from, we
don’t hide it, it’s no secret, but what people care about is who’s working
here, who helps make the decisions about what’s going to happen, just as they
wondered about with Pumalín and Corcovado, will we make national parks out of
it? Well, now we have a track record for doing so, so I don’t think people
worry about that. Certainly the government’s not worried about it.

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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

When adventurous birders think of travel, they often head to
the tropical rain forests of Asia, Africa and the Americas, with their
celebrated abundance of species. It’s an axiom of biodiversity that the low
latitude tropics, especially the forests, are home to large numbers of species,
even if individual numbers of those species are relatively few. By contrast,
higher latitudes have fewer species, but larger numbers of individuals of each
species.

Chile has no tropical rain forests – in fact, its own sizeable
sector of the tropics, between the Peruvian border and the Tropic of Capricorn,
running just north of the port city of Antofagasta, is among the world’s
driest regions, if not the driest (see the semi-ghost town of Pisagua, pictured above). But the country’s “crazy geography” (a term
popularized by geographer Benjamín
Subercaseaux), stretching to the tip of Cape Horn, provides enough diverse
habitat to support nearly 500 species of breeding or visiting birds
(Subercaseaux’s Spanish title Una Loca Geografía has been less literally
translated into English as “A Geographical Extravaganza”).

According to Álvaro Jaramillo, author of Princeton’s newly
published Birds of Chile,
this makes the country an ornithological extravaganza. There have been several
field guides to Chilean birds, but most of those cover restricted areas, such as
Enrique Couve’s and Claudio Vidal Ojeda’s bilingual Birds of the Beagle
Channel/Aves del Canal Beagle, or are difficult to find, such as the
English version of Braulio Araya’s similarly titled The Birds
of Chile. Jaramillo’s is by far the most current, with illustrations and
distribution maps for every species.

Birds of Chile accurately describes all the country’s avian
habitats, starting with the northern deserts and altiplano (high Andean steppe).
It continues south through the Mediterranean matorral and sclerophyllous
(glossy-leaf) forest, resembling the chaparral of California, through the
temperate rainforest of Patagonia’s islands and fjordlands. It ends at the Magellanic
tundra or moorland at the South American continent’s tip, home to the rare
striated caracara (pictured above). Jaramillo also covers Chile’s coastline and islands,
including Easter
Island and the Juan Fernández archipelago, as well as offshore waters and
even the Antarctic Peninsula, the Falkland
Islands and South Georgia.

For birders, one of Chile’s underappreciated gems is Parque Nacional Lauca (pictured above),
where flamingos fly above cobalt blue lakes and verdant wetlands that are home
to nearly a third of all species found in the country. At the city of Arica, on the Pacific coast, the
Atacama desert is at its driest, but its highlands near the Bolivian border get
ample summer rainfall that make species such as the giant coot, Andean goose
and Andean gull abundant. For birders from the northern hemisphere, of course,
just about everything is a new addition to their life list.

Jaramillo, whom I know slightly, is Chilean-born and still
has family there, but lives near Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. He
operates his own birding tours of Northern California, Argentina,
Chile
and Easter Island through Alvaro’s
Adventures, and also leads occasional trips through Uruguay.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Argentina’s Peronist government of President
Cristina Fernández and the conservative administration of Buenos
Aires mayor Mauricio
Macri rarely agree on anything. Since Cristina’s recent re-election,
though, they have decided to work together on at least one topic – the transfer
of responsibility for the Subte
from the national government to the city.

As
I detailed in an earlier comparative article, Buenos Aires’s underground
railway is one of the world’s oldest and still functions well, but its sluggish expansion has caused to
it fall far behind Santiago de
Chile’s sleek Metro system, in
both quality and extent of service. Buenos Aires, though, has a distinct
advantage in terms of price – a single-ride ticket for the Subte costs 1.10
pesos (about 26 US cents), while the Metro fares range from 520 to 630 pesos
(about US$1.10 to US$1.35), depending on the hour.

That’s because, until now, the Argentine federal government
has paid enormous subsidies, presently amounting to 70 million pesos (about
US$16.5 million) monthly, to Metrovías,
the private company that has operated the Subte since 1994. With the transfer,
that subsidy may disappear and, if it disappears completely, city residents
could see the cost of their commute and shopping trips triple to 3.30 pesos or
even a bit more.

According
to the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, when Metrovías assumed control of the
Subte, fares were then 70 centavos, with the peso at par with the dollar. Since
then, fares have increased by 57 percent in peso terms, but have actually
fallen by 63 percent in dollar terms, at the same time that the number of
Metrovías employees has nearly doubled - even as the system continues to underserve
poorer neighborhoods in the south and west of the city.

According to La Nación, the federal government “gave up any
plan of investing in the network some time ago. They never undertook the
modernization of the rolling stock, nor did they upgrade safety equipment. It
will take US$1.3 billion to finish those infrastructural improvements…” In
fact, when the mayor tried to attract private investment in the network some
years ago, the federal government prohibited him from doing so.

In that context, it looks as if the city may gain a nominal
control over its public transportation system that may require it to sacrifice additional
expansion simply to keep that system serving the privileged passengers, and
employees, it already has.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Argentine President Cristina Fernández managed an impressive
re-election victory on Sunday, October 23, but her honeymoon could be short.
Almost immediately after the election, confident with a nearly 40-point margin
over the closest challenger, her government instituted new foreign exchange
rules intended to reduce capital flight or, as
her current economy minister/vice-president-elect Amado Boudou described it, “money laundering.”

No matter what one might call it, Argentines have been
betting on the dollar for decades – only during the 1990s, when the peso was at
par with the US currency, did the demand drop. But it’s not a stereotypical
issue of smuggling money across borders – in reality, neither the business
sector nor middle-class Argentines have much confidence in the populist
government’s economy policies. Its notorious manipulation of inflation
statistics is one symptom, and many people view the dollar as a hedge against a
potential devaluation.

In reality, the purchase of dollars through legal means has
forced the government to put is own currency reserves onto the market, to avoid
a precipitous decline in the peso (currently at an official rate of 4.20 to the
dollar, it trades at 5.10 on some informal markets). Yesterday, according
to the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, the new bureaucratic controls
brought foreign exchange transactions to a virtual standstill.

What does this mean for visitors to Argentina? In the short
run, very little – my wife is presently in Buenos Aires, and she reports no
difficulty in acquiring pesos from local ATMs. Until now, however, it’s been
possible to obtain either pesos or dollars from many ATMs, and that’s no longer
true (for all Boudou's blathering, it's hard to imagine big-time money launderers abusing the ATM option by withdrawing the maximum US$250 per day). And those who need to turn pesos back into dollars at the end of their
holidays may find it more difficult than it once was.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, sooner or later, the government
instituted multiple exchange rates that would encourage people to bypass
official channels entirely – making backroom exchanges to get their dollars.
That would be highly prejudicial to the travel and tourism sector, as services
would be higher at official prices than they would be for those using the
so-called “parallel market,” an Argentine euphemism.

Meanwhile, the situation is toughest for Argentines presently traveling abroad – many have suddenly found that they can no longer
purchase dollars or other foreign currencies in North America, Europe, or
elsewhere in the world. Unless they’re carrying large amounts cash, or have an
overseas bank account, their only alternatives are credit cards.

Moon Handbooks Patagonia on the Road

Continuing this week, my promotion tour for the new third edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia will approach its end in a series of digital slide presentations on southernmost South America. In addition to covering the capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the gateway cities to Patagonia, I will offer a visual tour of the Chilean and Argentine lakes districts, Argentina's wildlife-rich coastline and Chile's forested fjords, the magnificent Andean peaks of the Fitz Roy range and Torres del Paine, and the uttermost part of the Earth in Tierra del Fuego. I will also include the Falkland Islands, with their abundant sub-Antarctic wildlife.

The season’s last event will take place Thursday November 3, at 7 p.m., at the Lafayette Library, 3941 Mt. Diablo Blvd., Lafayette, CA 94549, tel. 510/385-2280. Under the auspices of the World Affairs Council East Bay Chapter, this is the only event that will charge admission - $15 for WAC members, $17 for all others. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for a wine tasting and tango demonstration, both included in the admission charge.

For those planning trips to the south, there be will be ample time for questions and answers. Books, including my other titles on Argentina, Chile and Buenos Aires, will be on sale at all events.

Argentina Travel Adventures App

With more than 30 years living and traveling in Latin America, I write guidebooks to the "Southern Cone" countries - so called because of their shape on the map - of Chile and Argentina. I'm especially interested in the remote, scenic Patagonian region overlapping the two countries. I am the sole author of Moon Handbooks to Argentina; Chile & Easter Island; Buenos Aires, including the city's hinterland and coastal Uruguay; and Patagonia, including the Falkland Islands.
I have a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and have done research in Peru, Chile, Argentina and the Falklands, where I spent a year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar.
My home base is Oakland, California, but I spend five months a year in southern South America. I often stay in Buenos Aires, where my Argentine wife and I have a second home, an apartment in the barrio of Palermo.
I speak fluent Spanish, less fluent German, serviceable Portuguese and desperation French.
Any questions, please contact me at southerncone (at) mac.com, or leave comments by clicking on the word "comment" at the bottom of each entry. Comments are moderated, but I get to them quickly.